The Trump administration has launched a wholesale ideological and fiscal attack on higher education, holding federal funds hostage while demanding a ransom in the way of wide-ranging curricular and disciplinary changes. At the time of this writing, Columbia University has capitulated to its recent shakedown, but Harvard’s recent refusal to follow suit has inspired other institutions to speak out while faculty at Big Ten schools have formed a coalition in defense of academic freedom.
We are now witnessing a reckoning replete with danger to higher ed as a whole and to the humanities in particular, which have already suffered under austerity measures and cuts since the financial crisis. The agenda being set at the highest levels of government is unabashedly ideological and sectarian and shows little sign of stopping.
This attack also builds on several “pre-existing conditions,” two of which I explain here in relation to the financial crisis of 2008/9. The full social, political, and economic effects of that crisis have never been fully gauged, never mind remedied, and the solution to financialization was more financialization. This was an enormous missed opportunity. The stopgap austerity measures and reactive strategies ever since further weakened the notion of higher education as a public good, with rising tuitions, enormous student debt, and mass adjunctification only underscoring the decay. The fisco-ideological weaknesses predate the current crisis, in other words, even as the scope of the present attacks is unprecedented. Restoring higher education to its rightful status as a public good requires reckoning with that fact, particularly if the administration pursues more privatization and rent-seeking, as is already happening at the K-12 level.
Pre-Existing Condition 1: Endowments and Financialization
The financialization of higher education accelerated after 2008, especially for schools with endowments exposed to expensive, illiquid, difficult to value, and largely unregulated private funds (also known as “alternative investments,” these include private equity, hedge funds, venture capital, REITs, and similar investments). Facing large endowment losses and bond payment increases after the crisis, more and more schools chased the purportedly greater (but largely illusory) yields promised by private funds by increasing endowment portfolio allocations to alternative assets (although as of this writing, Yale is exploring a sizeable sale of its private equity holdings). During the same period, the money under management by private equity alone grew from $1 trillion in 2008 to over $4 trillion in 2018, a figure that has changed little since. As I’ve argued previously, such investment strategies lead to increasingly autocratic and unaccountable modes of governance. This is of a piece with the elite donor, trustee, and alumni networks that facilitate paths of entry into the most profitable private fund investments, as Charlie Eaton and Albina Gibadullina have also pointed out.
Columbia offers an interesting case in point, given its frankly shocking capitulation. Although its Board of Trustees leans Democratic and not Republican, when large amounts of money are at stake (especially in the secretive world of private funds), party affiliations give way to a calculus of money and power — and ethical principles are easily forgotten. What, for example, are we to make of the fact that Columbia University may have as much as $4 billion invested in thirteen vehicles controlled by a single investment outfit (CIM Group), according to its latest available tax filings? Or of the fact that CIM Group has been called Trump and Kushner’s “secret business partner”? Is it mere coincidence that CIM founder Richard Ressler is the brother of Tony Ressler (co-founder of Apollo Global Management and Ares Management) and the sister of Debbie Ressler, who is married to Apollo co-founder Leon Black, who is still under investigation by Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden (D-Ore) for his “extensive and unexplained financial ties with Jeffrey Epstein”? Is it relevant that Leon Black’s son Ben has been chosen by Trump to head the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, despite his “limited foreign policy and legislative experience”? Or that Ben co-authored a piece with Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir) called “How to DOGE US Foreign Aid”, arguing for an “investment-driven model focused on strategic project finance initiatives” — which, in all likelihood, means a greater role for the financiers of Wall Street and substantially unregulated speculation using taxpayer money? Columbia is not alone in being exposed to companies profiting from Israeli occupation and genocide, but the quick submission of its leadership raises questions about the precise interests brought to bear on its decision-making.
Similar webs of conflicting interests abound across the boards of many if not most universities, ensuring that universities remain responsive to their trustees’ and donors’ efforts to leverage wealth and private interests above all, rather than their educational mission. This is not a system set up to defend a public good, but rather a dense network of private, behind-the-scenes influence, prestige, and profit-taking. Making such networks more visible is an important first step toward making leadership more accountable.
In principle, endowments could be used to stop-gap losses from cancellations of federal funds — at least for a time, while the AAUP/AFT and other lawsuits progress. But if trustees and governors conceive of their fiduciary responsibilities as being in sync with the world of oligarchs, big donors, and private funds, that is unlikely to happen, and hedging in the form of increased bond allocations won’t be enough to stem the possible losses.
Protests for divestment from Israel, while by and large not leading to divestment, did draw attention to how deeply institutions of higher ed were tied to the world of finance and the activities from which it profits, including war. This is not new: higher education has long been oriented toward government and industry priorities, particularly in STEM fields. When James Ridgeway addressed the issue in The Closed Corporation in 1968, during the Cold War, over 2/3 of federal research funds going to universities came from Defense-related departments. The political economy of American universities has long been integrated with the military-industrial complex, now with the addition of Silicon Valley and tech. That addition is presently proving destabilizing, not least because the ideological worldview of so many in tech, as journalist Gil Duran and others have repeatedly pointed out, is corporate, authoritarian, and hierarchical, with no regard at all for the public good, which is seen as a barrier to private profit-taking.
The organized outrage of a new generation of students unwilling to accept a world dominated by extraordinary violence, atrocity, and war crimes has once again exposed the nexus among private, for-profit businesses, foreign policy, and their own institutions. Many of these institutions have “obeyed in anticipation,” by calling in law enforcement, even expelling and revoking the degrees of their own students who raised questions that their institutions could not, did not, or otherwise refused to answer. The repression started before Trump II, but it signals an increasing cultural tolerance for attacks on academic freedom and independence.
Pre-existing Condition 2: STEM vs the Liberal Arts and Humanities
Before Columbia’s capitulation, the Wall Street Journal attempted to frame the institutional climate there in terms of a “civil war” between STEM and humanities faculty. In contrast with the STEM faculty interviewed, who were “too focused on their work to get involved” in the protests, humanities faculty were described as exercising disproportionate influence (and overmuch leniency toward protesters) because they controlled “key committees in the Faculty Senate.” This is a frankly puzzling assertion, as faculty governance has declined precipitously over the past decades, and even more since Covid; also, as Timothy Kaufman-Osborn has argued (and as events bore out), the trustees at Columbia held ultimate decision-making power. The WSJ framing here is symptomatic of an ideological attempt to pit ‘economically valuable or productive’ activities (STEM) against those then considered not to be (humanities).
The executive class that comprises boards of trustees widely considers STEM a key driver of careers, profits, and value, typically in concert with business, finance, law, and consulting (occupations now dominant on university boards).
After the financial crisis of 2008/9, the Obama administration touted STEM as the wave of the future, and many universities established “tech hubs” and incubator funds in order to capitalize on the latest of the nation’s crisis-borne enthusiasms for progress and material gain, no matter the cost. The Trump administration’s threat of withholding federal funds obviously affects this highly financialized ecosystem. It also disproportionately and unfairly affects the research, careers, and lives of many dedicated STEM faculty. Since the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, universities have been allowed to own patents for discoveries supported by federal funds, typically but not always distributing proceeds between the institution and faculty-inventors.
By contrast, the work of humanities scholars functions quite differently. Institutionally, the humanities are often the target of cuts and austerity, and they do not typically produce comparably valuable intellectual property, despite bringing in the lion’s share of tuition revenues (not to mention contributing to institutional prestige and reputation). The majority of both STEM and humanities scholarship is gated from the public by near-monopoly interests such as Elsevier, Springer, EBSCO, and Wiley, who charge ever-increasing annual licensing fees to the universities who supported the research in the first place. Government funding has supported both STEM and humanities research, but taxpayers are unable to access much of the work that they paid for. Of course, DOGE and Trump have not targeted this obvious conduit of privatized waste and financialization.
Publications are the main creations in the humanities, unlike in STEM, whose patents generate value on other grounds. Gating humanistic work increases public ignorance about topics that are issues of public debate. Humanistic scholarship has, after all, been at the center of Chris Rufo’s attacks on “woke”, CRT, DEI, and so on. Its relative public invisibility makes it easier to lie about, as he has repeatedly done. These attacks are also unlikely to stop, especially if universities continue to comply by changing curricula and cutting or restructuring programs.
The WSJ framing recapitulated the Trump administration’s strategy in trying to pit STEM and humanities against each other: On the face of it, STEM looks like a productive source of revenue and funding, while humanistic study represents both political risk and financial expense. Which would a university run like a business be more likely to invest in and nurture, and which one to cut or suppress? If that question seems easy to answer, then the very idea of a university is at serious risk. There is a name for this strategy: sectarianization.
The administration may eventually go after the Bayh-Dole Act itself and attempt to redirect property rights derived from government-funded research more fully into the private sector and away from universities. If that happens, it will be imperative that disciplinary divisions be put aside in favor of the holistic ideal embedded in the etymology of the word “university” and to present a united front against both the administration’s financial extortion and its attacks on academic freedom. These are of a piece, and threaten the very idea of the university as a whole.
Private Riches Must Give Way to Public Goods
ICE is abducting current and former foreign students across the country under pretenses so flimsy as to seem arbitrary. This is already sending a profound chill across the globe that will surely drastically reduce the number of students coming to the US from abroad, resulting in enormous academic and cultural losses and leading to substantial declines in tuition revenues that will ripple across the economy. In 2008/9, there were only 179,000 foreign students. In 2023-4 alone, over 1,000,000 international students contributed almost $44 billion to the US economy, according to data from NAFSA.
In short, foreign students became a main revenue stream for colleges and universities across the country after the 2008 financial crisis. These students often pay full tuition and are generally ineligible to receive Pell grants, loans, work-study, and other sorts of federal funding (which may also be on the chopping block, furthering the incoming budgetary crisis). That people supplying once-welcomed tuition dollars could so quickly be transformed into potentially expellable ‘enemies of the state’ is a breathtaking, if indirect, admission of how instrumentalized and therefore vulnerable higher education in the US had already become.
John Ruskin once observed that “what is really desired, under the name of riches, is, essentially, power over men.” This, our oligarchs and their political allies have brazenly and repeatedly displayed. One dismal truth about our country’s vast wealth is its ever-more predatory underpinning, something that did not originate with the Trump administration, but has rather been baked into the increasing financialization of our economy, particularly since the financial crisis. Universities have been partners in that process, even as they’ve also attempted to uphold some notion of the public good within it. But what is happening now is a reckoning.
Both political parties have, after all, contributed to understanding public value in chiefly economic terms. And in doing so, they have impoverished the very concept. In oligarchies, unlike in democracies, true prosperity, rights, and well-being belong only to a few. Oligarchs do not need the public to preserve what they can simply buy and over which they can then establish exclusionary controls. This characterization unfortunately increasingly matches the American present, and things are likely to get much worse, because the current administration has shown no regard for public benefits independently of their potential for private extraction. In response, as Chris Newfield has recently argued, now is not the time to be conciliatory, but to ask for the university we really want. As Ruskin also noted, after all, “value” shares its roots with valor, or courage.
